Books: Doctor’s Dilemma

EACH MAN’S SON (244 pp.)—Hugh MacLennan—Little, Brown ($3).

Hugh MacLennan, 44, is probably Canada’s top novelist. In the U.S., his books (The Precipice, Two Solitudes) have sold moderately well but have failed to attract as much notice as they deserve. One reason for this neglect may be that MacLennan, like many another modest craftsman, makes poor copy for publishers’ publicity. Instead of crusading, shouting or tying the English language into advance-guard knots, he quietly goes about his business, which is to write good, solid novels about Canadians.

His latest, Each Man’s Son, is set in his native Cape Breton Island, which lies off the Nova Scotia mainland like a rugged facsimile of Scotland. It is the story of Daniel Ainslie, the best doctor in town, who discovers in middle age that he is a desperately unhappy man despite work, respect and a good wife. What ails the doctor is simple enough: he wants children, and now it is too late. But since he and his wife have long ago stopped talking about their childlessness, the doctor doesn’t recognize his own symptoms. When he steps in and begins to supervise the life of little Alan MacNeil, he tells himself it is simply his duty to a youngster whose own father has abandoned him. At first, Alan’s mother is pleased by the doctor’s solicitude; then she senses that, though good Dr. Ainslie doesn’t know it, he is really trying to take her son away from her. Moreover, though her husband is only a broken-down, half-blind prizefighter somewhere in the States, she wants her boy to be taught loyalty to his real father. It takes two deaths to make Ainslie realize what he has been trying to do, and to recognize that well-meaning and even competent solicitude is no substitute for blood.

Each Man’s Son has both poignancy and the special flavor of its setting. MacLennan knows his island intimately, and writes about it with affection.